Around a third of the UK's larger organizations - around 6,400 - will implement big data analytics programs in the next five years, pushing the demand for big data specialists up by 243 per cent to 69,000.

The figures come from a report produced by e-skills UK on behalf of SAS UK & Ireland which collected data from over 1,000 organizations.

The survey discovered that adoption rates for big data analytics amongst the SME community is extremely low: of the 541 SMEs contacted as part of this study, none had implemented big data analytics at the time of questioning. Adoption rates were found to be much higher amongst larger businesses and increased from 9 per cent for firms with 100–249 employees to 25 percent for those employing 1,000 or more. In total, though, fewer than one in seven (14 per cent) of firms with 100+ employees in the UK were found to have implemented big data.

It also found that on average there are in the region of 94 core big data users per organization that had implemented big data, equating to a total user base within the UK (amongst large organizations) of approximately 383,000 people.

A key finding is that 90 per cent of firms believe they could achieve major or minor business benefits by raising the skills of their big data analytics users. Almost half of those organizations (45 per cent) believe they would realize business benefits through appropriate training. This is especially important as three out of five large UK organizations find it challenging to hire the specialists that they need.

SAS is already taking action to address the skills gap. SAS Curriculum Pathways offer free online tools to teach maths and science in schools and it provides a visual analytics database relating to the Titanic disaster to support the GCSE Computing curriculum.

At University level 16 universities teach SAS on computer courses and over 50 PhD and MSc programmers are supported by SAS.

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